Russell Werner Lee (July 21, 1903 - August 28, 1986)
Russell Werner Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois on July 21, 1903. He
attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and graduated from Lehigh
University in 1925 with a degree in engineering.

Lee began his career as a chemical engineer but grew
dissatisfied after four years in manufacturing. Encouraged by his first
wife, artist Doris Emrick, Lee began to paint. The Lees left the Midwest
for San Francisco, where Doris wanted to study. They arrived just before
the 1929 crash of the stock market and the onset of the Depression
and immediately became engaged in the thriving art community there.
From San Francisco, the Lees next moved to the New York art colony
of Woodstock, where they lived in the summers from 1931 to 1936, spending
their winters in New York City. In 1935 Lee began to experiment with
a camera as an aid to his painting and soon gave up painting in favor
of photography. He and Doris went to Europe, where she studied art
and he traveled, observing life in Eastern Europe, Germany, and the
Soviet Union.

In 1935 Lee began to photograph miners and record
conditions in Pennsylvania coalmines. His growing interest in social
issues and his affinity for photography as a means of recording social
conditions brought him in contact with other visual artists, among
them Pare Lorentz and Ben Shahn, whose work he admired. He heard that
Shahn was involved with the documentation program of the Historic Division
of the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security
Administration, and decided to seek a job there. His first assignment
for Roy Stryker was to photograph the Jersey Homesteads housing project
in 1936. When Carl Mydans left the agency, Stryker offered Lee a full-time
job.

Russell Lee's photographic work continues to be associated
with the documentary tradition and the work of the Farm Security Administration
under the direction of Roy Stryker. As part of the team that also included
Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, Lee's primary task
was to document rural communities with the goal of making urban Americans
aware of the plight of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers
stricken by drought and the Great Depression. Stryker assigned Lee
to cover the Midwest and the West Coast, where he typically stayed
on the road much longer than expected. Lee made some of his better-known
early photographs in rural Iowa in 1936. He traveled throughout Texas
and New Mexico between 1939 and 1940. Lee and his first wife grew apart
during this time and divorced in 1938. During the 1940's, Lee's distinctive
work appeared in hundreds of newspapers and popular journals including Life,
Look, Fortune, U.S. Camera, and Survey Graphic.

Shortly after the U.S. entered Word War II, the Historical Division transferred to the jurisdiction of the Office of War Information. Lee left the FSA group and joined the Air Transport Command as a captain in January of 1943, assigned to take aerial surveillance photographs as well as documenting local conditions on the ground. When the war ended, Russell Lee resigned his commission and in 1947 he and his second wife Jean Smith moved to Austin, Texas. From 1965 to 1973 he taught photography at the University of Texas. Although Lee often traveled as a free-lance photographer on assignment for magazines, corporations, the federal government, and the University, Austin remained his home and Texas a major focus of his work until his death in 1986.